Today marks the 3/4 mark in my Iron Artist Challenge. The Hibiscus is one of my favorite flowers, mainly due to having played Final Fantasy X and Disidia Duodecim, where the design is used for Yuna's clothing and character design.

In the language of flowers the hibiscus represents Gentleness and Delicate Beauty, truly capturing the qualities the hibiscus has

Before I essentially start this critique off, I would like to compliment you on how well you have done. The Hibiscus flowers are truly very gorgeous flowers, and you have managed to, in this piece, capture it's true elegance and beauty.

Vision For vision, I gave you three stars. This is because I feel that there needs to be a bit more shading added to this piece in order to create a more realistic look. I have a feeling you may have refrenced a white Hibiscus with a darker-pink middle, but even on white flowers you can still see some dimensions when comparing the lights and darks. To add to this, it helps to create a smoothh rendition between each value of lights and darks; so from the middle (the darkest) you could possibly gently smudge the graphite outwards to show the blending of colors between white and pink. Don't be afraid to make your lines darker and use darker colors! In the middle where the Style springs from the petals, I have a hard time decyphering where exactly the borders are because the two shades are too close together.Other than that, I really like the little detailed veins you have added.

OriginalityFor judging a portion such as originality, especially in this piece, it is harder to give a bad rating. I don't believe people should be docked points just because they wanted to try out their skills and improve on a popular medium. Therefore, I gave you five stars for this one, in understanding that you want to improve and wanted to practice on a thing such as this.

Technique As for technique, I believe this somewhat ties in with what I said previously in Vision. In order to make it seem more realistic it is always a plus to shade everything in and create more values.A really helpful thing for this is to buy a small pack of pencils with things like H, HB, B, 2B, 4B, etc. (It really doesn't matter what brand you get, although I do reccomend either Faber Castell or Prismacolor(the more expensive of the two).. They are really great pencils and they can help you achieve the shadings that you wish to get.)Also, dA, as you may know, has many different tutorails to help teach you and to help better your artistic skills!I went completely out of my way and found some tutorials for you, if you'd like to take a look:[link] - Shading Tutorial[link] - Tutorial: Shading and Blending[link] - Shading Techniques

Impact All in all, this is a very nice piece; however, there are sme little things here and there that could be improved. Even though there may always be someone out there who is better, do not let that stop you from being the best you can be. If you keep striving for the best, you will eventually learn and improve.Practise makes perfect C:Thanks for reading.